So, free food at work. I grabbed a yogurt that touted its unique style and no preservatives (important). I opened it up and ate a spoon. It tasted odd (not bad, necessarily - just odd), but I thought it was just a result of the style, so I ate another. Still odd. So I looked at the lid - it was over two months over its expiration date. Dairy + two months rot + no preservatives = fun times in the future, I'm sure.

So while I wait for the food poisoning to take hold (I just hope that it doesn't take me out of work, and that it comes up instead of rushing down; that's easier to handle), what's the most "bad" food you've eaten?

~23 years expired Fruit Loops. The package was still sealed and I didn't recognize it as old. I bought it at a bodega in NYC that had just remodeled and apparently the box had fallen behind a shelf. The loops didn't have much sweetness but the texture was still good.

I can't bring up the college newspaper article about them (apparently too old for the current archives), but it was pretty funny at the time. Kellogg's had "No Comment" about their incredible shelf life.

About a year ago I took some Tylenol for a headache. An hour later I was still complaining that it didn't work. My wife looked at the bottle and said "I can't imagine why a bottle of Tylenol that says 'Use by 12/2001' would be ineffective eleven years later."

We probably also have "spices" in our pantry that are that old. I put it in quotes because needless to say they do not impart much flavor at this point.

When I was a teenager I was in a group of hikers who came across a burned-down cabin in a wilderness area. There were still some remnants of food items brought in by hikers roughly contemporary with the fire, which was 15-20 years in the past, and among these were some cans of food. I inspected a can of some kind of fruit and the can itself seemed intact, so I opened it, sniffed it, cautiously tasted it, then ate a full serving of it, claiming that if it was in an airtight can it should not have deteriorated and I hadn't found any rust spots.

They didn't put "fresh dates" or "best used by" dates on cans back then.

I once drank a little bit of an off brand form of Ginger Ale that was bought for me because I was sick with a stomach virus at the time and the person who got it for me did not realize that the bottle had expired almost a whole year earlier. (shaking my head)

So, free food at work. I grabbed a yogurt that touted its unique style and no preservatives (important). I opened it up and ate a spoon. It tasted odd (not bad, necessarily - just odd), but I thought it was just a result of the style, so I ate another. Still odd. So I looked at the lid - it was over two months over its expiration date. Dairy + two months rot + no preservatives = fun times in the future, I'm sure.

So while I wait for the food poisoning to take hold (I just hope that it doesn't take me out of work, and that it comes up instead of rushing down; that's easier to handle), what's the most "bad" food you've eaten?

Yogurt is already rotten, you know; that's what they mean whey they say "live and active cultures", just a bit more live and active after a couple months (as long as it wasn't opened).

Granny has a habit of giving us things from her freezer. Like any elderly person who was poor growing up, she hoards food supplies, and we've learned to check the dates on anything she gives us.

I think the record holder was a frozen turkey she gave us a couple of years ago that was from the early nineties! It was actually older than my youngest child. My daughter made turkey and dumplings out of it. No, I didn't try any, but my husband and daughter ate it and swore it tasted like normal turkey.
* shudder *

Not me but my mother. (And this will tell you how cheap and stubborn my family is.)

I was visiting and rummaging in the fridge and came across a jar of Strawberry Jam that was expired by like 13 years. I brought it out to her incredulous because they had moved house like three times in that time span, apparently lugging this antique jelly from state to state. She insisted it was perfectly fine so I got a spoon and insisted she eat a bite. She said "FINE!" Scooped a spoonful out (it had by this point achieved the consistency of spackle) and ate it.

One time when I was working at Tedeschi's (convenience store) I noticed some expired beef jerky. I took it off the shelf and went around the store is took everything that had expired off of the shelf. I was going to take it all home, being a 20 year old poor college kid, but a coworker complained, saying "that's b******* that he gets to take this food home. I could be feeding this to my kids." The food was put back on the shelf. Always check.

Another time I was moving out of a dorm room, up and down three flights of stairs. I was suitably hot and sweaty when I went to move my mini fridge. I noticed some milk in there and took a nice deep gulp. Chunks. Horror. Not refreshing.

Sardines packed in olive oil have fairly arbitrary best before dates, likely more to do with stock rotation than anything else. It's usually two or three years in the future, but they age beautifully for years after that. I've eaten some two years after the expiry date, and they were magnificent.

I'll use eggs and dairy products as long as a month after the date, as long as they look and smell OK. I'll used canned goods as long as a year after the date. Mr. Sali found a Kit Kat bar from last Christmas, almost exactly a year old, he said, do you want this? Works for me! It was fine, though not very crisp inside.

My family has a cottage in northern Quebec, built by my grandfather. In that cottage, a lot of things are left that stay more or less forever - or at least, for decades.

A decade ago, before we thorougly purged the food stored in the kitchen, there were glass jars with Red River Cereal in them that dated to the early 1950s. That said, I have no idea what its original expiry date was. But it was some half-century or so old.

I found a single serving yoghurt in the fridge that was a year past its best before date. I wasn't brave enough to eat it, but I did open it and was surprised that it still looked pretty good.

I often buy meat that's at its best before date and toss it in the freezer to eat months later, don't know if that counts. I have some salad dressing in the fridge that's probably a year past that I still use on salad and will continue to until it's gone.

Just tonight I bought a bunch of UHT boxed milk that was on clearance really cheap, this is the shelf stable stuff that is unrefrigerated. The check out lady tried to warn me away saying it expires tomorrow! I was like meh, even if I don't leave them in the pantry they freeze fine and we have an empty chest freezer. This is like months of milk supply for a little over 10 bucks, I'll ignore exp. dates for a deal.

After my mother passed away, I inherited her kitchen and everything in it. I decided to go through her spice rack and toss whatever was unusable. Some of the spices were too old to have expiration dates, but they had addresses with "Zones" instead of ZIP codes. The U.S. transitioned from Zones to ZIP codes in 1963.

Then I realized that I had used some of these spices in my omelet, the day before.

Granny has a habit of giving us things from her freezer. Like any elderly person who was poor growing up, she hoards food supplies, and we've learned to check the dates on anything she gives us.

I think the record holder was a frozen turkey she gave us a couple of years ago that was from the early nineties! It was actually older than my youngest child. My daughter made turkey and dumplings out of it. No, I didn't try any, but my husband and daughter ate it and swore it tasted like normal turkey.
* shudder *

I didn't eat this, but I found some some ranch salad dressing in my granny's fridge recently that had exprired in 1991. Yucky!

Granny has a habit of giving us things from her freezer. ... I think the record holder was a frozen turkey she gave us a couple of years ago that was from the early nineties! It was actually older than my youngest child.

Wow, that's amazing. In my part of the country/world anyway, it'd be nigh impossible not to have endured at least one power outage/blackout in that time span, which is what would really worry me about a frozen turkey with a "Perot in '92" sticker on it. I know I've had to empty my freezer due to losing power for 24+ hours at least twice in just the past ten years, never mind twenty.

Some of the other responses in this thread are really great too. Eating stuff that "expired" before my kids were born is one thing. Eating stuff from beore I was born, even as far back as WW2 rations, that's awesome!

The best I can offer is a little bottle of Listerine (3 fl. oz.) in my drawer at work that I keep in a small box of "emergency sundries" like contact lens solution and case, aspirin, a small eyeglass repair screwdriver, a few Band-Aids, and so on. I noticed the other day the Listerine expired in Jan 1999. I don't see why it would have an expiration date, obviously I don't use it very much, and by now it's kind of a curiosity, so there it will remain indefinitely.

I was about 10 years old and in school they were talking about foreign foods. I was pissed off that I had never tried any of them! (Granted, we lived in a small town in Illinois, and back then there was nary a recent immigrant for 100 miles, but I didn't think of that.)
Went to the grocery store with mom and there, on the bottom shelf, with layers of dust, was a single can of tamales!
Now I cannot be sure how long it was there, but I do remember the label had almost rotted off and there was indeed lots of dust on that can. I insisted mom buy it.
At home I made mom open the can and heat those canned tamales up!
Oddly, nobody else in the family wanted to go near it.
Stubborn little kid as I was, I dove in and at almost all of it alone!

Dry heaves for days! I don't think I have ever been that sick. Botulism? E. coli, listeria or salmonella? Combination of all? Whatever it was, it was not pleasant.

The problem is, there was some spice that was quite strong in there, and if I even get a whiff of it today (many, many, many decades later), I want to put my head in a toilet again! So - I cannot get near a Mexican restaurant. No fun living in LA and friends would go out for Mexican food and I had to pass and meet up later for drinks. Often, even when walking down a street past a Mexican restaurant, I can get a faint odor of whatever that spice is and have to go to the other side of the street. Even at work, if someone pops in some Mexican food in the microwave, I have to leave the kitchen area pronto.

This is the best laugh out loud thread I think I've ever had the pleasure of enjoying. I wish I had my own story to share, but as much as I use best by and expiration dates as mere guidelines, I don't think even I have ever eaten anything that was more than a year past the printed date.

No. I have cumin in my spice shelf and that is no problem.
Also, I don't think is is cilantro...I have sampled that (don't particularly like it) but it doesn't send me running to the bathroom and wanting to wretch.
So - not exactly sure what the spice is, but I sure as hell know it when I smell it from afar.

When we moved out of our house last year we threw a lot of stuff out that expired in the 90's. My worst real eating expired stuff experience was eating my then favorite sandwich: bologna on white bread with miracle whip. It tasted a little funny but since I always read while I ate I kept eating and reading. Finally I came to the end of a chapter and looked at what I was eating: blue bologna on green bread. I haven't eaten a bologna sandwich since....at least 20 years. I also gave up white bread and miracle whip.

At the other extreme, my foster daughter will not eat dry foods (for instance, saltines or boxed mac-n-cheese) that is even a week past its "best by" date.

How old is she? My daughter, who is 10, is a "best by" fanatic. We've tried telling her that "best buy" is not the same as "turns into poison immediately after", but she starts giving things the stinkeye when they're even approaching their best by date.

My sister and her erstwhile roommate disagreed on this constantly (them both moving to separate places was unrelated). My sister throws things out when they spoil. Roommate throws things out when the date says they're expired.

How old is she? My daughter, who is 10, is a "best by" fanatic. We've tried telling her that "best buy" is not the same as "turns into poison immediately after", but she starts giving things the stinkeye when they're even approaching their best by date.

I wonder what your daughter would think of non-foodstuffs that have an expiration date. The prospect of using, say, Gold Bond Medicated Powder as the date on the container approaches.

About a year ago I noticed that my powered creamer had sort of a funny taste. Not too bad, just a little different. Checked the expiration date - October, 1982. Only 30 years out of date. I don't think even Hostess Twinkies can last that long.

I only had a taste of this one- but when I was at school there was a really cheap sweet shop round the corner run by a really old guy. Me and the friend I walked in with used to call in regularly on the way to school, and one day she bought a new kind of toffee bar, one neither of recognised; she tried a bit and said it tasted a bit odd, and had a texture more like fudge; I tried a bit and agreed, it didn't taste like toffee at all.

At that point, we checked the packet, just to double check it wasn't some new weird toffee, and discovered that it wasn't a new kind, it was a kind they'd stopped making somewhere around a decade earlier, and it'd clearly been sitting in the shop since...

We still bought stuff from there afterwards- hell, the prices were decades old as well- but did tend to check the dates after that. It closed down about a year later, I guess someone else wasn't as forgiving about selling years out-of-date produce to kids as we were.

A few years back a few of us were helping out a elderly lady who recently lost her husband by doing some cleanup and home improvements. She lived on a few acres of land that also had another very old, broken down home on the back of her property where her mother had lived many decades ago.

While in there we - don't ask why I could not tell you - opened the fridge, which was still powered but barely working. In addition to the 30 year old moldy luke warm air that waffed from the appliance was an assortment of rotting food, including an unopened can of deviled ham an expiration of 1981.

Yes we opened it
No it did not look that bad (actually still looked pink)
Yes it had a funny smell but not rotten
No we dared not eat it

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